Tulsi Gabbard questioned US Intelligence. Now she is Trump’s pick for top Intelligence role.
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead powerful U.S. spy agencies has often seemed to embrace Washington’s adversaries and questioned key American intelligence judgments, raising alarm among veteran intelligence officials and the wider national security establishment.
If confirmed as director of National Intelligence, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii would hold a post whose extensive powers include briefing the president on the most sensitive U.S. secrets, exercising authority over the $100 billion annual U.S.
spy budget, and holding sway over which secrets to declassify. Gabbard, an Army reserve lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq but has little intelligence experience, has yet to lay out her plans for the position, which was created in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks. But her past comments preview the potential internal clashes she could have with intelligence professionals.
“Of course there’s going to be resistance to change from the ‘swamp’ in Washington," she said in a Fox News interview on Wednesday. Her goal, she said, will be “to defend the safety, security and freedom of the American people." In interviews and social-media posts, Gabbard has blamed the NATO alliance for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and echoed a Kremlin claim that Ukraine hosted U.S.-funded labs researching dangerous pathogens. She later clarified her remarks, saying she was worried about the danger amid the war of pathogens escaping from Ukrainian biological laboratories.
U.S. funding of Ukrainian biological labs has focused on efforts to improve security and prevent the escape of pathogens. Gabbard and the Trump transition didn’t respond immediately to a
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